On Wuorinen's String Trio: Two Analytic Sketches

Abstract

ON WUORINEN’S STRING TRIO: TWO ANALYTIC SKETCHES ANTON VISHIO I. A FEW DAYS AGO I WAS STANDING in front of a painted image, measuring two metres by two, of paradise. And after a moment, standing still, gasping a little, I entered it.”1 So John Berger began a late essay describing his immersion in the vibrant painting of a friend. The comparable musical experience, of being inside a composition— literally inside it, observing its unfolding as it envelops me—is one I have had rarely; one particularly memorable occasion was when I served as the second pianist in a performance of Charles Wuorinen’s Percussion Symphony. Towards the end of the first movement, the celesta player introduces a quintuplet figure, a wide turn focused on a central pitch. Gradually, this spreads in some form across nearly the entire ensemble. Just as peak density is attained there is a massive slowing down over the fourfold-repeated final passage; by the end, the tempo has reduced to an astonishing one quarter of its original rate. As the music decreases in speed one feels that it is just on the point of locking in. Indeed, the richly contrapuntal skein seems to begin to separate, allowing one to hear the interaction of the parts more and “ 318 Perspectives of New Music more vividly. But the process never completes; one is drawn farther and farther into the network without feeling that its focus has reached maximal resolution. I have been reminded of my experience of the Percussion Symphony in trying to account for the immersive character at the outset of the String Trio (Example 1). The work begins with what Wuorinen has described as a “drone” on G, upon which the principal materials of the composition emerge; and drones are surely well suited for drawing a listener inwards.2 In an overview of Wuorinen’s compositional trajectory through the 1980s, Jeffrey Kresky mentions this opening and its reversal in the guise of a long stretch of mainly quarter-note motion at the end of the composition as an example of the composer’s “initiating and concluding tendency toward dramatic straightforwardness.”3 JoAnn Kuchera-Morin, in her extended analysis of the work’s serial structure, expands even further on the use of the drone as a formal device: its presence in specific sections helps to demarcate the twelve-part plan she asserts for the entire work.4 Initially I too had heard the drone as a formal element—as something that expressed one end of a continuum of organization. The constant element in the background on this hearing serves as a gravitational point, not only in terms of pitch relationships but also as a kind of stable texture, binding other sonic elements to it even in the absence of a strong rhythmic profile. As Kuchera-Morin observes, “those passages which contain slow unfolding melodies over drones tend to sound senza misura in contrast to the contrapuntal and homophonic passages.”5 In other repertory, I have considered such passages to act analogously to the “tight knit” (as against loose) passages that bear stable, expositional qualities in William Caplin’s theory of formal functions.6 EXAMPLE 1: STRING TRIO, MM. 1–3 Copyright © 1967–68 by C.F. Peters Corporation. All rights reserved. Used by kind permission. On Wuorinen’s String Trio: Two Analytic Sketches 319 But further listenings left me dissatisfied that such an interpretation was warranted. Instead of finding the drone as an initial state of stability from which the work departs, I found it a remarkably active, tensionbearing feature—indeed, not very drone-like at all.7 This is not to deny the idea that the unfolding at the outset of the piece has close analogies to the practice of alap in North Indian music; but the differences remain instructive. The drone in classical Indian music, for instance, is the tone (or the complex of tones) against which other tones create events of tension and release. As N. A. Jairazbhoy, wrote, “the drone affects the dynamic function of notes.”8 And of course in that music the drone is nearly always present in some acoustical form, whether or not our attention is explicitly drawn...